Recommended reading - Blue City

Blue City

by Ross Macdonald.

Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
First published 1947.
Paperback.

ISBN-10: 0307740730
ISBN-13: 978-0307740731
 
Description:
 
“[The] American private eye, immortalized by Hammett, refined by Chandler, brought to its zenith by Macdonald.” – New York Times Book Review.
 

“Macdonald should not be limited in audience to connoisseurs of mystery fiction.  He is one of a handful of writers in the genre whose worth and quality surpass the limitations of the form.” – Los Angeles Times.

“Most mystery writers merely write about crime.  Ross Macdonald writes about sin.” – The Atlantic.
 

“Without in the least abating my admiration for Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, I should like to venture the heretical suggestion that Ross Macdonald is a better novelist than either of them.” – Anthony Boucher.

“[Macdonald] carried form and style about as far as they would go, writing classic family tragedies in the guise of private detective mysteries.” – The Guardian (London).

“[Ross Macdonald] gives to the detective story that accent of class that the late Raymond Chandler did.” – Chicago Tribune.

He was a son who hadn’t known his father very well.  It was a town shaken by a grisly murder – his father’s murder.  Johnny Weatherly was home from a war and wandering.  When he found out that his father had been assassinated on a street corner and that his father’s seductive young wife had inherited a fortune, he started knocking on doors.  The doors came open, and Johnny stepped into a world of gamblers, whores, drug-dealers, and blackmailers, a place in which his father had once moved freely.  Now Johnny Weatherly was going to solve this murder – by pitting his rage, his courage, and his lost illusions against the brutal underworld that has overtaken his hometown.